Everything is on your phone, tablet and computer. In the latest versions. Instantlysynchronized across all devices. You can access everything from anywhere. The ski slopes, the cafes, the beaches by the sea. Whether you have an apple in your pocket or a green monster. You don't even think it should be any different. This is the benefit of the cloud. So obvious that we don't even talk about the cloud in these cases. It just is.
And then you come to work and the world changes. At least the working world. Because it has to be safer. That's why we need to keep our data on our servers. Or even in the office, under the desk. And we mustn't use personal devices. And certainly not remotely. But... is this approach really more secure?
Personally, my opinion on this is quite clear. All my activities have been "in the clouds" for over ten years. To my full satisfaction. And safety. I'm just one.
I had to ask someone more experienced how it is in companies. So I took Jakub Herink, Sales Director of Geetoo Technology, to the studio. Together we discussed the topic in depth. What did we touch on?
🔸 When is the right time to move to the cloud?
🔸 What are the typical blockers to moving to the cloud?
🔸 Who is the cloud not for?
🔸 How to get out of trouble?
🔸 What to do when moving from cloud to cloud?
HOW TO CHOOSE AN EFFECTIVE CLOUD SOLUTIONS (TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today's Ignition is going to be about the cloud, but don't be alarmed, today we're not just going to talk about why the cloud and how great it is, but we're going to discuss maybe a little bit more important things, what to do if things don't go completely right with the cloud. For that, I've brought on a guest from the most knowledgeable people, Jakub Herink. Hey.
Jakub Herink
Hi, Martin.
What surprised Jakub the most about the psychology of relationships?
Martin Hurych
Martin is Head of Sales at Geetoo Technology. I'm going to start in a completely different way from business and the cloud. You like the psychology of relationships, so I'm curious to know what surprised you the most.
Jakub Herink
In general, I guess we can start by saying that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Quite often it ends up being that and people don't think about it much more, but then it's interesting to think about it in that depth and start to address that understanding at all. I've read a couple of books and I enjoy reading it, I enjoy being educated by it. Luckily I have a great partner as well, so I'm not alone in that, she enjoys it as well, which I have to say is a good start to making sense of it. So I had to explain that it's not tobut that we can all benefit from it.
The crucial thing is to understand the thoughts in general and to understand what the other person is saying. A beautiful example is,that when it comes to something fundamental, where my health might be at stake, my partner doesn't see the situation in a positive light, gets angry and insane. I've always historically taken it to mean that I didn't understand why she was yelling at me, that I knew I was doing something that was on the edge, but then when you figure it out and understand it, you realize that it's actually just her defending herself and showing that she's worried about me and that's it.
For this reason, then, it is good to just think about what it means that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Each of us can perceive a little bit differently the given situation, the given problem, and in the same way it will not work for every woman that we buy her a diamond, but she will be happier if we go for a walk with her.
What does Geetoo Technology do?
Martin Hurych
I'd like us to come back to this maybe later in the business, anyway, now we'll look at the cloud and Geetoo Technology. How did you get into Geetoo Technology, what's your career path in a nutshell, and so that we understand the perspective from which we're going to comment further, what's Geetoo Technology, how big are you and what do you do?
Jakub Herink
It was preceded by the fact that around 2003, 2004 there was this boom of internet cafes and this world. I was lucky enough to come across some great people in the centre of Prague who gave me a space and I was able to run an internet cafe there. At the same time, I was a partner of 100MEGA and I was building computers for clients. That was fun for me, to deal with the fact that everybody has different needs and perceives things differently, and a computer for the office is probably a little bit different than for some nerdy guy who needs to make it work and play games on it.
After that I joined AUTOCONT for 6 years, where I worked as a system engineer. There, I was already helping companies build infrastructure, taking care of the infrastructure they had in place toto make sure it all ran smoothly, and I suggested where to take it from there. I advised them whether they should buy this or that to make it work the way they needed it to work. That was kind of my entry into the IT world.
Geetoo Technology has been on the market for about 20 years and it started there with web hosting and web application development and things like that. Over time it started to morph into something a little bit different. It was no longer about doing pure web development, which is still very much in vogue today and it's still definitely interesting trend. But then came the client requests, where the guys, the founders were at the stage where they were helping to write the e-shop and suddenly in that company they started to deal with the linking to the warehouse, the linking to different things around. That relationship was already built there and those guys started figuring out how they were going to do something else and how they were going to run that infrastructure, for example. From that, we just started to add another part in Geetoo, where we started to deal with running just the economic systems, ERP, CRM and so on directly in the cloud. But that was still very much at the beginning of the cloud, I wouldn't call it the way we see the cloud today.
What is the situation on the market for cloud in B2B business?
Martin Hurych
As I was preparing for this topic, I was thinking that I've personally been in the cloud for about 10 years, when the first Dropboxes, OneDrive, and the like existed. I actually on one hand don't understand why it's still a topic because I've been living in it for years, people around me have been living in it for years, every phone is connected to the cloud today, yet I hear around me that it's far from being the case in business. So can we somehow define or describe the situation that we have in is around the cloud in the business and enterprise sphere right now?
Jakub Herink
It's certainly a great analogy. It is, and quite often, even when we talk to clients afterwards, they don't even get it the first time that we're using iCloud or OneDrive or SharePoint or all of Office 365 today, so that's what we use by default. But they don't have that connection there that it's actually already a cloud service, that it's already something that's in the cloud. It's funny that even today we run into a company that is resisting going to the cloud, but of course their employees just that cloud and how many times it's IT for corporate stuff. Quite often we still see companies in the Czech Republic or Slovakia splitting cloud and cloud. Office 365 is one thing for them, but then when we talk about running those ERPs and CRMs, that's a whole different discipline. It's called infrastructure as a service, and maybe that's the line that we've unknowingly made there with that terminology, that those companies still perceive that the cloud is a little bit different. Then, of course, we find that when we describe to them what it is and how it works, that it's easier for them to grasp and they can move in that direction. But certainly what is true is that there are still a lot of companies today that are not using that infrastructure or that ERP, CRM or the cloud in general for those applications that would they could. Most companies use it as photo or document storage, but for the infrastructure itself, a relatively small percentage still use it.
What are the typical blockers to moving to the cloud?
Martin Hurych
What are the typical blockers for companies that don't want to go to the cloud?
Jakub Herink
There are more, but most often it's definitely that they feel like it's going to be terribly dangerous, that it's going to be about not having control. Of course, there are people, I'll specifically mention the geeks again, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way, who are toy geeks and love having that server and unpacking it out of that box and putting it in that rack with them. We'd come in there all of a sudden saying we want it pick it up. The same feeling with the owners is that now I have it with me, now I have it here and I have it under control, I have security and whatever happens, nothing will happen to it because I have itHere. But the reality is that when we talk about security, ransomware is popular today, having it locally is far more vulnerable than when we talk about cloud infrastructures.
Martin Hurych
Not to mention the potential physical threat it poses.
Jakub Herink
Absolutely. Unfortunately, we are already at a time when tornadoes are affecting us and it resonated a lot in my bubble because it also affected the data center in Moravia. Luckily it didn't have any impact, it just messed them up a little bit on the outside, but it's just that today I feel like we can't be sure of anything.
When is the right time to move to the cloud?
Martin Hurych
A humorous story I've heard, a flooded server from a clogged toilet. There's nothing you can do about it. I was wondering, when's a good time to go to the cloud?
Jakub Herink
I guess it depends on your perspective, who you're talking to and what stage you're in. If the company is just at the point where they're picking a new economic system and they think it'sgreat to combine that with the fact that we would go tothe cloud, it's not always the right move. It's good to break it down into projects, it's good to tell myself what I need to tackle right now. If we're going to be replacing, say, the infrastructure itself and I'm deciding whether to buy new servers or go down the cloud route, that's the ideal time. But if I'm changing applications, that's where it can happen that I change the application, I change the infrastructure, and now there's a problem somewhere and I don't know where. Is it that I changed the application or is it that I changed the infrastructure? It's too many steps at once and it's good to break it down.
Again, it cannot be said that there is a relatively simple rule of thumb as to when the right time is. It's about having that discussion with the client and saying what stage they're at and what are the needs that they have right now. What should be the game changer for him to go to the cloud in the first place is the flexibility, it's the speed, it's the security. Quite often we see that on a client that was in the previous maybe half a the year of the ransomware attack and he's worried about what's next. He's afraid he'll be attacked again, so he wants to go that route and secure the cloud instead. That may be the moment again to say we're going that way.
Why do you need a cloud strategy?
Martin Hurych
It might be too strong a word, but would I understand correctly that I need a cloud strategy?
Jakub Herink
It's true. The fact that today the cloud is virtually anything and it's all around us, as you said yourself, you've been using it for x years and we've kind of gotten used to it and even those companies are moving into it, that's where the other part of the problem comes in and that's cloud chaos. Even in our segment, we have a lot of clients that have moved to the cloud 10, 11 years ago when it was really in the flush. They've got it all down, they know how to do it, they know what to run, they know how to grasp it all and what applications to choose from. Our clients are also many small and medium-sized companies from the manufacturing sector andthey still had fax machines until recently. I just happened to be talking to a partner right now, and they still run fax services for a couple of clients. But now they're about to take this huge stepand, of course, things can start to get scrubby. As it starts to fray, they will start to wonder if they have taken a step in the wrong direction, so they will take it in a different direction and bring more chaos and more entanglement into it. They then come up with the fact that they have something in Azure, something in AWS, something in Google, then they have something at the local provider and now it's all not working together. It's slower than it used to be and it builds up this hatred of the cloud and hatred of the fact that as long as they had it under the table at home it worked and now they've gone to the cloud, it's more expensive and it doesn't work.
A real example from our clients is that the client decided to go the Azure route because they saw the economic sense in it, that it would be cheaper than running it in our cloud. Because the client was European, they needed it to be available everywhere. So they took it one to one as they had it here, migrated it to Azure and expected the invoice to come in relatively similar, a little bit lower than it would come in from us. But all of a sudden they got an invoice that was double what they were getting from us. They didn't understand why when it's actually the same thing. So then they called us and said they needed help with that, so we they optimized it, we did a little bit of strategy over it, we figured out what makes sense to have in Azure and what is good to put elsewhere and 2, 3 months later they were getting lower invoices.
Who is the cloud not for?
Martin Hurych
So who is the cloud not for? When would you ever consider dissuading that client from the cloud? Digitization, automation, cloud equals, I want to be modern, I want to be ready for the challenges of the coming years. When would you talk that client out of it?
Jakub Herink
I like stories because it makes it easier to understand and I have a great story on this very subject. It's a few years back when I was with a client, coincidentally it was a manufacturing company again. The guy was a terrible cloud enthusiast, you could really see in him that he was this technology guy who wanted to push himself and loved it. I got there, we started talking about it, he was already in our time he was backing up his data and he wanted to just shift that and take everything he has in the company and put it in the cloud. When we started talking to him, it came out that he had manufacturing machines connected to the ERP system. That might be one snag, but at the point where he had good connectivity, for example, it might not be that much of a problem. But he had connectivity from a local provider where he had no guarantee that it would work and that it could happen that it would not work for 5 days and the provider would have no recourse. But the reality was that the moment those production machines didn't have access to that ERP system, they wouldn't work and he wouldn't produce. I told him I was sorry, I understand that I'm here for the cloud provider, but he can't go to the cloud. I can guarantee him availability and everything, but if there's this article in between where that availability is not guaranteed, that's not the way to go. Coincidentally, there was still a complaint against me afterwards, but I knew very well why I made that decision.
Where there's something extremely dependent on it, which is locally at that manufacturing company, that's where it shows up awfully nicely, I would definitely think about how to capture that. I'm not saying it can't be a way, there may be tools today to secure it at least in part, but it's going to be scrubbed and I would already be thinking about it there.
How to get out of the cloud in case of trouble?
Martin Hurych
What if we disobey you, go to the cloud, and then it turns out you were right about how to get out of the cloud?
Jakub Herink
That's also my favorite topic, exit strategy, it's kind of controversial. Today, a lot of cloud companies, VMware and others, of course, are looking at exit strategy andperceives that this can be a difficult subject for the client. It's true that not everyone brings it up in those business meetings because why would they mention that I won't be happy in the cloud, I will be happy in the cloud, but it can happen. The company is going to expand, suddenly it's all over the world and it doesn't need a local cloud provider anymore, it needs Azure or someone who is all over the world, whatever makes sense. There's obviously the problem that can come with that, is that again, if the company doesn't think about it to begin with, that this situation can arise, they'll take that and somehow put it in there. But then if they're going to get away from that cloud, that's a big project.
We have also seen this exact thing happen. There was a directive from a mother abroad, no cloud strategy, everything is going to be local and they were in a position where they already had a lot of stuff there and they didn't know how to get out of it because it was situated on that particular provider. Certainly the bottom line is to choose providers that even offer that option to leave. We address it with our clients in those meetings so that they think about it that way, so that they're not held hostage because it's not a proper business relationship between us. The moment we write it down with the client right at the beginning and we determine right away what happens if, then the client approaches it much better. There are definitely those tools today and you can walk away from those clouds, but there are still cloud providers today where that road back is difficult and hurts a lot.
What to do when moving from cloud to cloud?
Martin Hurych
Now it's probably good to clarify if it's cloud to cloud or if I'm going from the cloud back to the racks.
Jakub Herink
It's both. If I take us, we try to use the most profane tools like VMware and that will offer the client that wherever they decide to go after that, they can relatively easily. If the VMware is on the other side, then he can easily. If we're talking about using other tools, it can scrub. I'm not saying it's unrealistic, but it can scrub, it can get into a situation where it's going to migrate purely data, it's not going to migrate applications, it's going to start all over again and just migrate data. There's always that path, but sometimes it's simple and sometimes it's complex and it's good to define that at the beginning and define what's coming and what may occur when he needs to walk away from that.
What to consider in advance to minimize potential problems?
Martin Hurych
Now we've gone over when to cloud, if to cloud, what if something goes wrong in the cloud, or possibly how to get out of the cloud. What should I, from a position of just thinking about all of this, should I prepare for data, should I consider something so that the cloud strategy minimizes these potential pitfalls that we just talked about?
Jakub Herink
It's definitely the vision of the company, where it wants to take it. Do we want to expand, do we want to expand in that direction or who should be our client? Is it going to be public sector or is it going to be commercial, am I just going to be in Europe or am I going to be global? Those are fundamental questions that then play a pretty fundamental role in choosing that cloud strategy. If I want to expand, it doesn't make sense for me to be locked in locally by some cloud provider that's only in the Czech Republic.
Likewise, there may be different laws that may come into it. For example, in lotteries or casinos they have quite strict rules if they have to be in the Czech Republic or if weto talk about casinos in Slovakia, that they must be only in Slovakia. These are all things that can come into it and it's good to know that in the introduction and discuss it with the client. Enoughwe often run into the fact that IT comes to the meeting and they don't think much about where the company is going. So then we have to ask questions and find out, because we don't always give you the infrastructure and it's done.
Whose job is it to create a cloud strategy?
Martin Hurych
You've now hit on a very sensitive subject. In those smaller and medium-sized companies, whose job would be the cloud strategy or IT strategy in general? Often there is no dedicated person in these companies, the owner doesn't really understand it or doesn't even want to deal with it because maybe they don't have the time. I often see these things like digitization, automation, cloudification fall under the CIO, who would rather fiddle with numbers than deal with IT, which he doesn't really understand. So who should do it?
Jakub Herink
It's ideal to meet everyone. If it's laid out the way you describe, there's definitely not one decision maker and not one person who should decide.
Martin Hurych
I understand that you have to tread on all sides. Now, if I sit in the chair of that potential business owner who says they need to prepare for the future, they want to expand, who ideally should be the one in that company that internally gathers those internal requirements and writes it up?
Jakub Herink
Ideally not the IT guy, because he's IT and he's more interested in it from an infrastructure position. But if it's the CIO or if it's the owner, that's not bad. But if we talk about the business part, it's clear from experience that if we outsource it to the CFO or the CIO, it's not going to have what we need completely. That is why it is better then to do one, two, three meetings where we meet everybody and discuss their needs in general and then we are able to take something from that and recommend something to them. Then we can do another meeting where we meet and reconcile if that makes sense at all for them.
If they have it so spread out, it is not good to identify one, because he will always prioritize his needs at that moment and then there may be a problem. Any change always hurts and someone will always look for the bad in it. The rule of thumb is that the moment we change anything at any time for users, it will always be wrong. If I just change a button in the information system from red to blue, that's a big problem, and we're talking about doing a big hit to the infrastructure and the whole understanding. It may be that we change the rules in their security, that all of a sudden they're not just going to have to type in a 123 password, but it's going to be two-factor authentication. That's why it's good to have that thumbs up from all those people to make sure they're on board with it, so that then they can all be able to explain to those users why they're doing it and why the change is coming.
Martin Hurych
So do I understand correctly that the cloud strategy is more business than technical?
Jakub Herink
Yes, that's right. At the beginning, it may seem like we're talking purely about whether we're going to use so much CPU and so much RAM, but if we want to talk about making sure that it has a head and a tail to the business and to the company overall, that's definitely a bigger topic.
What is multicloud?
Martin Hurych
One more terminus technicus is flying around the world, multicloud. Moreover, I found out that you have great ambitions for international multicloud and want to be the biggest multicloud expert in Central Europe. What is multicloud anyway?
Jakub Herink
As we've talked about, it's not about there being more local providers these days and we're done with that. AWS, Azure and everyone else has entered that market as well. We thankfully and thankfully have also started to understand that Azure is not just going to go away and AWS is not just going to go away either, that
Jeff Bezos would think it'd be better to just sell books again. So we started to see it as this is something that we have to reckon with today and at the same time it's something that we used to see as a competitor. Today, we see it more as an opportunity and as a value-add, and it's really the case today that Microsoft itself is driving a lot of those clients to its cloud. There are already products today that you're not able to buy without being on Microsoft vAzure. But what we're hitting at that point is that suddenly that company has part of it in one cloud, part of it in another cloud, and now they have to connect the dots and they have to make it all fit together and make sense. That's why the chaos, that's why the cloud strategy, because suddenly at that moment it can make sense that I'm going to have a database in Azure andvAWS I will have the development. At that point it's really multicloud and I need to look at some multicloud strategy.
That's what we're here for, to help clients not only transition to us, but to really understand that whole world. By doing this for us for a long time, we understand a little bit of the nooks and crannies behind it, whether it's in AWS, Azure, or whoever. We're able to then help them with that and define that. But again, it's good to understand that, for example, as much as there's this trend around multicloud today and everybody's using multicloud, the cloud in the end in that concept can be what I have locally on my own. I can then connect that to the cloud and suddenly I'm part of that multicloud and I'm already extending that to the next part.
How does the cloud sell?
Martin Hurych
We can all imagine those results, the underneath and how to get to those results looks relatively complicated for an amateur. You're a sales director, how many salesmen do you manage now?
Jakub Herink
We're going through some changes right now, so unfortunately we don't have as many on the shop right now, but we should be expanding. Right now we have something like 5, 6 people on the store and we're definitely planning on growing, so we're planning on having at least 10 more people on the store next year.
Martin Hurych
The question is, how does the cloud sell?
Jakub Herink
Certainly not by credit card, or at least not in our terms. Obviously Azure and AWS you're able to call out easily, but I think the value we add and what Geetoo does is we put our face on it. We're addressing that with the client as well and talking to them about just their needs and that's why we need that sales team, that's why we need those people because we don't want to just sell it electronically. Let's face it, we can't sell it by email, we'd get an enquiry, we'd respond to it and that's how we win it. The value we add is really that expertise and that's why we need to be with those clients and be there for them. For us, it's very much relational, it's very much about being with those clients and dealing with the day-to-day needs that they have.
How does knowledge of relationship psychology help in business?
Martin Hurych
To close the story arc today from relationship psychology to relationship psychology, you just named relationships in business, how does relationship psychology help you in business?
Jakub Herink
Absolutely brilliant and not just what I retrieved. When you look at the children, I have two children, I have two boys, there's a beautiful simile, I love to use that. When I assign a child at home, clean your room, it's a very general task and most likely at the end of that cleaning I'm not going to be
satisfied. Because he won't do something, or at least he won't do it the way I imagined. In the same way, I can't go to a trader and say, make an acquisition or tighten upof this client. I have to give him the tools he needs to do that, the necessary incentives to do that. I'm not saying that I should be in the role of a micromanager, I'm certainly not, but we have to define at the beginning what we expect from it and what the outcome should be. If I say to a child, vacuum so there's no crumbs, that's definitely better than, clean your room.
Those things definitely help, as far as the relationship goes. Like I said, we all speak a different language, woman, man, or even in that final shop. There's such a beautiful analogy, if I say go buy a chair, you're probably not going to buy the exact chair I expected, and we're guys. It's the same with the salesmen. If I need those salespeople to have some specific results and to move, then I need to give them specific things and help them grow specifically. Those are definitely topics that help me personally.
Martin Hurych
I'm going to lose one more question on this here because the typical role in a lot of firms in my bubble is not, tighten up this client, but go out and sell. What do you do in your business to make the salesperson effective? How do you set the stage for him so that he knows what to do, when to do it, and how to do it?
Jakub Herink
It's a great topic. We've been through some changes, you had our colleague Vojta here a long time ago, with whom you also dealt with some of our attempts at expansion, which didn't go well. We've drawn a lot from that in exactly this direction of things and themes that we can't pass on our culture and how we want to do it because we have to have it written down so that these people all understand what we want to do.
Our goal now is to put a lot of energy and time into education and into understanding and into moving those people. For us, it's a given to educate technical people, to have certifications, to have that expertise there, but we were also at a stage where we were pretty much neglecting or forgetting or rather taking for granted the soft stuff. Just the fact that a salesperson would know how to dress, that a salesperson would know how to take someone out to lunch, that a salesperson would understand the difference between lunch and dinner. We've kind of been living under the assumption that it's obvious, that it's implied, but we've come to the point where it's not. Here, over here. So we need to spend a lot more time and a lot more time moving on these things and giving those people those tools and those opportunities to move on to be the partner that they need to be for that firm and for that client.
Bonus
Martin Hurych
I'd love to discuss this in more detail here sometime, and if I can, I'd love to have you back. Finally today, you guys have a bonus for us, what's it going to be?
Jakub Herink
I'm sure. Unfortunately, we don't have the bonus of putting it on your site. We were thinking about how to grab that and what could be in there, but we thought putting some sort of entry form in there to get started with the cloud strategy would be terribly generic and not our style. We really want to come to these clients and have a conversation with them. But we'd definitely like to offer clients at least a free half-hour consultation and talk through these topics around the cloud and around how to grasp the whole thing. When so they contact us, we'll be happy to get back to them and go to their offices and take a look at it and make that time available to them.
Martin Hurych
Should we direct this at you or anyone at Geetoo Technology?
Jakub Herink
Be sure to reach out to me on LinkedIn or however you contact me.
Martin Hurych
Great, thank you very much.
Jakub Herink
Thank you too, thank you very much.
Martin Hurych
You see, we've discussed the cloud at length, I hope we've made that a little clearer for you. Clearly there's nothing to worry about, and if anything, we've got a partner in crime here. If you're interested in the episode, we did our job well. Be sure to share it, like it, comment on it wherever you're watching or listening right now and whatever the platform allows. Be sure to check out my website, www.martinhurych.com, where in the Ignition section there's this episode, but there's a bunch of other episodes as well. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.